Showing posts with label mothering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mothering. Show all posts

Monday, September 06, 2010

This Post has a More Interesting Title than I Do

I have been finding it difficult getting Pumpkin to appreciate and understand the whole concept of my being a stay-at-home mom vs. a world where I could have been a working mom.

It started with her telling me that when she grows up, she wants to be a mommy. I explained that this was a great thing, but that she could be both a mommy AND have some sort of career if she wanted. The result of this was having her explain to me several weeks later, "Mommy, did you know that you could be a mommy AND a magician???"

Hey, it's good to have goals...

Fast forward a month or two later, Pumpkin asked, "Mommy, when you were a little girl, what did you want to be?"

"A doctor", I answered, not really being truthful, but figuring it was as good an answer as any.

"But you decided to just be a mommy instead?"

'Just be a mommy'. Ugh. I began lecturing her on how I am not 'just a mommy', and also how I could have been a doctor too, (as if!), but that I wanted to focus on my children and blah blah blah blah was all she heard as she tuned out to admire something shiny.

Fast forward another month or two, Pumpkin was asking why Daddy was at work.

'Well, someone's gotta pay for all this shit', was the gist of my reply. Then to revisit the discussion from the month prior, I got into how in some families, both parents have to work, and added how lucky we were that we could afford for me to leave my old job so that I could be home with Pumpkin and Chichi.

Pumpkin replied, "Well I think that you still have a job to do."

Beaming with delight that Pumpkin was recognizing the work involved in taking care of her and her sister, I asked, "And what do you believe my job is, Pumpkin?"

"Laundry", she replied matter-of-factly.

Sigh. Magician school is starting to look better and better.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Mother of the Year Once Again

Pumpkin has been trained to stay in her room until 7 am every morning. This morning, she showed up by my bedside at 5 something. She wasn't particularly upset, but she said something about being scared, or not, as I wasn't really paying attention in my sleepy stupor. She said that she wanted to stay in our room.

In the past, whenever we have allowed Pumpkin to join us in our bed, she has only wanted to play, which is both annoying, and not acceptable at 5 am, thus she has never actually slept with us. I wasn't about to start this habit, so I said either go back to your bed, or sleep on the floor with Lucky. I figured that she'd head back to her room, and then I promptly fell back to sleep.

It's a good thing that we have cushy dog beds, because that's where Pumpkin was when I glanced over in that direction upon waking up two hours later. To make matters worse, she later told me that she had a bad dream about a bad guy named, Jason, who was chasing us. This is the first I've ever heard her speak of a Jason. She won't watch The Princess and the Frog, but somehow managed to catch at least part of Friday the 13th???

Wow I'm bad at this.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Here We Go

When I signed up for NaBloPoMo back in November of 2007, I felt like a part of a community. Most of the bloggers that I read were doing it too, and we all signed up to suffer together. That community has somewhat disbanded. Posts are few and far between these days, with me being one of the worst offenders. My readership may be down to a few friends and family members, but I just don't feel ready to throw in the towel just yet. I figured doing a post a day for a month will either indicate to me if I've got anything left, or if I need to work on my singing career instead. You'd better hope that I've still got some writer left in me. Even my daughter screams at me to stop singing when we're in the car. Where else am I supposed to practice?

I've actually let quite a few bloggable things go unblogged over the past few months, which will hopefully give me the fodder that I need to fill those days when nothing else amuses me. Here's a good one:

Back in August I was having lunch with my mom's friends, a well-intending, wealthy, yet pushy couple. They were harping on me to get a nanny, which doesn't make sense to me seeing as I quit my job in 2006 so I could do the child rearing from start to finish each day. This is not always fun, and certainly not glamorous, but it was what I signed up for. Keep in mind that my mom helps me out quite a bit each day, and if I had a nanny, she and my mom would be fighting over who gets to wipe Chichi's butt at the next diaper change. Freeing up my mom's time was probably the main objective of this couple's argument, although my mom doesn't actually want to abandon her post over here. Honest! You can ask her.

After almost a whole day of receiving disapproving looks every time I mentioned being tied up with my kids for one reason or another, I finally asked the couple why they cared one way or another about my not having a nanny. The husband of the pair replied:

"I just think it would be great for you to experience the freedom that is motherhood."

(blink, blink)

Yeah, I thought that you would like that.